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Entertaining, illuminating and when you recognize yourself in the stories it tells mortifying. "Wall Street Journal" Every page sparkles with sharp insight and keen observation. Mistakes were made but not in this book! Daniel Gilbert, author of"Stumbling on Happiness" Why is it so hard to say I made a mistake and really believe it? When we make mistakes, cling to outdated attitudes, or mistreat other people, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so, unconsciously, we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong. Backed by years of research, "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by"Me")"offers a fascinating explanation of self-justification how it works, the damage it can cause, and how we can overcome it. This updated edition features new examples and concludes with an extended discussion of how we can live with dissonance, learn from it, and perhaps, eventually, forgive ourselves. A revelatory study of how lovers, lawyers, doctors, politicians and all of us pull the wool over our own eyes . . . Reading it, we recognize the behavior of our leaders, our loved ones, and if we re honest ourselves, and some of the more perplexing mysteries of human nature begin to seem a little clearer. Francine Prose, "O, The Oprah Magazine""

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This book is all about cognitive dissonance - a negative state that occurs when we hold one or more contradicting beliefs - and the self justification that occurs in order for us to reduce the discomfort felt by it.

We've all done it - friends, lovers, relatives, employees. Politicians, doctors and celebrities. You've probably justified away mistakes you made to yourself in your daily life, "it wasn't my fault I got that parking fine, everyone else was parking there" or "I only snapped at that customer because she was rude to me." This can also be applied to more serious situations in life, such as "I only had that affair because my husband pays me no attention", and especially to numerous political situations throughout the last century (I won't touch on specifics).

Whilst this book may sound anecdotal, it does have almost 40 pages of referencing in the back of the book - with the vast majority of these from peer reviewed journals. It's an engaging and incredibly interesting read, and is also at times rather sobering. I like the quote right at the end of the book that pretty much sums it up for me (paraphrased):

"Research on this subject is heartening because it suggests that at all ages, people can learn to see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow. The test of an individual’s character and integrity does not depend on being error free – it depends on what we do after making the error."

Most people have heard of Cognitive Dissonance - the experience of holding two conflicting beliefs at the same time, and the search for a way to reconcile them. This book is a good popular introduction to the subject, and also covers Confirmation Bias, which is what happens when we choose to believe or disbelieve evidence depending on what we think to be true, and whether it's consistent with opinions we have already expressed.Although marketed as a kind of self-help book, and written in a breezy, anecdotal fashion, the book contains many cases that are deeply disturbing, and have major social and even political implications. You may have heard about the unreliability of eyewitness evidence, but you will be surprised to find just how useless and easily manipulated it is. Stories of police inventing or hiding evidence to convict those they had already decided to be guilty will not improve your opinion of the forces of law and order. And the discussion of cases of "recovered memory" where parents and teachers were sent to prison for abuse of children which the children "remembered" under hypnosis or drugs, is quite horrifying, especially when you realise that some of the "therapists" responsible have never apologised or retracted.This is an American book, and so must include a compulsory discussion of how to overcome the problems described. But in practice, these problems seem to be very deeply rooted in the human psyche, and, even if we know that they exist in theory, it's not clear that we can - or would want - to avoid them in practice. The real issues raised are quite fundamental ones about, for example, how criminal justice systems work, and the book does not really explore them. It would also help if the authors had included a few more examples from outside the US - it would be interesting to know how, if at all, cultural factors affect psychological problems of this kind.

For clear, engaging explanations of psychological research, this is one of the best books you can get. Cognitive biases are like optical illusions, distorting our decisions, memories and judgement. This book focuses in particular on self-directed biases: the distortions of memory and explanation that make sure that each of us is the hero, not the villain, or our own life story.

When corrupt police frame innocent people, how do they justify to themselves what they are doing? When a couple divorce, how can two former lovers come to hate each other with such passion? When political or military mistakes lead to thousands of deaths, how do the decision-makers live with themselves? The authors take academic research (on cognitive dissonance, stereotypes, obedience and more) and apply it to a wide spectrum of issues from the White House to Mel Gibson's racism.

It is eye-opening to read how malleable and unreliable memory is, and how easy it is to create feedback loops of increasing certainty from just a glimmer of evidence. An appalling example is the recovered memory craze of the 80s and 90s, which is discussed at length. The book isn't entirely downbeat, even though it explains how prosecutions, marriages or therapy sessions can go terribly wrong. It shows how easy it is for good people to hurt others, but that we can avoid these traps with humility and self-questioning. They call science "a form of arrogance control".

A theme running through the work of these two psychologists is how science can address real problems of human conflict. That warm, humane spirit pervades this book and I think anybody curious about the science or the solutions would benefit from reading it.